Forms of participation: Working groups

[uosvald]

Hey all,

One of the main goals to achieve for the Polkadot Developer Heroes program is to have more and more initiatives and projects taken over by its members. Gradually this would lead to the members owning most of how the program is run and managed, but obviously this takes time and focused effort to achieve.

As a more concrete step, I'd like to float the idea of working groups (WG) for certain areas of the program and its activities. Some examples that I can think of:

• Mentorship WG: working on anything connected to the mentorship process. Some examples that could be taken on by this WG are to collaborate with mentors and create blueprints/playbooks on how to be a good mentor, how to set goals for the mentor pair, improve the mentorship process, etc. This group could also potentially coordinate with various hackathon organisers and seek out mentors to assist in hackathons (which is actually a frequent request).
• Meetups and events WG: working on meetups and events related activities. Some examples include building local meetup communities, providing organisational support, helping with treasury proposals, etc.
• Coding and development WG: working on collectively solving technical challenges that projects/individuals are facing or even build out functionality for the program (e.g. POAPs, member hub, coding challengesetc.).
• Public speaking and CFPs WG: working in the area of public speaking, which includes in-person events as well as online workshops proposed via the CFP process. The group could provide public speaking training, work with CFP proposal to improve their quality, seek out now topics that members would like to be educated about, etc.

Note that these are just examples. The creation of a working group would also involve finding a lead of the WG (with a fixed term rotation schedule), laying out its goals, scope of work and so on - a bit of formalisation is probably good.

Looking forward to any feedback or even better, concrete ideas what folks would like to do.